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Every year and every break-up — but I repeat myself — brings a new burst of pointless creativity. This year’s burst has been spent on Letterboxd, the handy film website that turns your experience into charts, lists, and data, all things I love.

It was a busy year, for reasons no one on the Internet needs remembering. The version of me that could watch 75+ new movies in a year is gone, long gone. The version that actually was around for first weekends of blockbusters and date movies, and had time to watch movies on planes — he’s still kicking.

Stuff I still need (or “need”) to see: I, Tonya; Call Me By Your Name; Phantom Thread; The Florida Project; Coco;? The Post. (No, there was no special premiere for all Post employees. There were several DC screenings and I wasn’t invited to any, NOT THAT I’M BITTER.)

Get Out
Everything about this worked for me — the enraging villains, the social mentary, the goofy friend and his cop-out ending.

Lady Bird
Greta Gerwig can do no wrong.

I, Daniel Blake
Prime Ken Loach, the sort of white-knuckle class war drama that nobody else can make without getting accused of ripping off Ken Loach.

Blade Runner 2049
Too long, and a few too many sops to the genre (why does the evil replicant hench-lady crush the memory stick instead of using it to see what K’s been up to? Oh, because she’s evil), but so gorgeous to look at. I am a sucker for world-building, and the work done here to take the decaying world of “Blade Runner” and make it decay further for 30 years was fantastic. Six months later I still can see those grey acres of wriggling “protein farms.”

The Big Sick
If Judd Apatow wants to keep handing the keys to younger edians with good stories, fine by me. Half winning, relatable rom-, half painful culture clash, and all of it works.

Dunkirk
It’s a good war movie, what else do you people want?

Logan
The kind of superhero movie that justifies the genre — though I’d say that about “Deadpool,” too, revealing how bad my taste is. I wasn’t sold on the X-Men ics being part of the movie’s reality, and it was a little on-the-nose to watch an ailing Hugh Jackman fight a brainless clone of Hugh Jackman at pivotal moments. But I haven’t felt this tense during a movie in years, and haven’t said “fuck!” as much in public as I did during moments when Logan and Lore brutally murdered the hapless henchmen who kept ing after them.

Baby Driver
Too long, especially since Edgar Wright has effectively made fun of the “you think he’s dead, no wait he’s back, no he’s dead, but what’s this” climax. The absence of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost means a lot less to sit with and quote back to your friends when it’s over. But extremely fun while you’re watching.

The Disaster Artist

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
I for one embrace our Gerwig-Baumbach overlords.

Spider-Man: Homeing

Thor: Ragnarok

The Shape of Water

Oasis: Supersonic

The Founder

Okja

The Lovers

Logan Lucky

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore

Beatriz at Dinner
Extremely effective, if a little stage-bound, drama about clueless rich white people interacting with the underclass. One thing that stuck with me was how Salma Hayek was shot — not as the bombshell letting her hair fall over her?decolletage, but as a short, savvy woman loomed over by arrogant no-nothings. Also contains one of my favorite performances of the year —?David Warshofsky as a tightly-strung suck-up to John Lithgow’s clearly amoral real estate tycoon.

A Ghost Story

T2: Trainspotting

I Am Not Your Negro

Wonder Woman
Far too long, but the World War I battle scenes make up for it.

The Lost City of Z

Darkest Hour

Downsizing

The LEGO Batman Movie

The Beguiled

Landline

Kong: Skull Island

Alien: Covenant

Table 19
Harmless and effective Duplass brother dramedy about a bunch of misfits who find happiness at a wedding no one wanted them to attend. Extremely ropey at times, but I shed an actual tear at the end of it, so respect must be paid.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi
It’s fine. The best parts add something new to the canon — Carrie Poppins! The worst parts make me dread how Star Wars movies will be part of our rote holiday tradition until Disney stops making money on them.

Justice League

Life

A United Kingdom
The kind of story that you can’t believe nobody’s adapted yet — as South Africa implemented apartheid, a black king of Botswana took a white, English wife, and was banned from returning to his country for years as diplomats alternately schemed and crapped themselves. It’s all very well told, but in a movie-of-the-week way. Also, how many more times do we have to watch Clement Attlee get owned in British historical drama? The man created the modern welfare state, and we have to watch him make inpetent grabs for power (“The Crown”) and cynically do the bidding of racists to acquire uranium (this movie).

Split

Colossal

War for the Planet of the Apes
These movies just leave me cold, and I guess I’m the only one.

It es At Night
Answering the question, at last: What would a post-apocalyptic drama look like if Terrence Malick directed it? The answer: Half tense, half pretty dull and un-engaging. Director?Trey Edward Shults has now made two very Malick-y movies that offer a semi-interesting spin on an established genre. Good for him, I guess!

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

The Fate of the Furious

Cars 3

Free Fire
“What if we spent an entire movie on just one shoot-out” is an idea that made sense to way too many producers and actors.

Snatched

Wilson
“Ghost World” is feeling more and more like a fluke — the rest of Daniel Clowes’s wince-inducing slice-of-life edies do not work when transferred from page to screen. Lots goes wrong here — Judy Greer as the cute neighbor who will obviously set things right drains the misery out of the script — but probably the best example of what’s lost in translation is a scene in which Woody Harrelson’s titular misanthope sits and watches a tree lose its leaves. In the ic, it was a one-page gag; in the movie, it’s shot like one of those Qatsi movies, all shutter-speed and emotional string sections.

The House
There are moments when the ic actors are really grooving, and you wonder why critics said this was a formless mess. Then you get to the third act and it’s a formless mess.

Ghost in the Shell
Boy, this one wasn’t helped by the existence of “Blade Runner 2049.”

Like many busy people, I spend roughly 40 percent of my waking life wasting time on the internet. The problem: The many mentators and reviewers who pollute the internet only ever talk about good TV shows and movies. Nobody wants to talk about the mediocre ones!

It’s a challenge, and I accept it.

“Apollo Gauntlet” (Adult Swim, 2017)
This defiantly stupid Canadian import began as a YouTube series and was picked up for a six-episode test run, a bit like “MDE Presents: World Peace,” but with less alt-right transgressions and more dumb pop culture references.?Myles Langlois’s vision was a parody of the detritus of 1980s D&D culture, sort of resembling the infamous CD-based “Zelda” game cutscenes but with choppier animation. Upgraded for a mass audience, it even more closely evokes those “Zelda” es, some of the most immediately hate-watchable entertainment of my generation.

The show itself is… fine? Langlois himself plays Paul Cassidy/Apollo Gauntlet, whose fortuitous discovery of magic talking gauntlets transforms him into the superhero for a generic fantasy world. His delivery is one of the best things about the show, lazy and distracted. It’s a bit like “One Punch Man,” a much, much superior show, in that the humor es not from setbacks but from a hero laconically conquering every challenge he es across.

I enjoyed the randomness of everything else, and the voice acting owns; Betsy Sodaro, a UCB veteran with a voice like a clogged paper shredder, is particularly good as the most petent member of the adventuring crew Gauntlet stumbles into leading. But too often, the jokes consist of out-of-place references and little follow-through. One example: When Gauntlet teams up with Dr. Benign, the James Urbaniak-voiced villain who sent him to this word, Benign suggests a plan that will be “just like ‘Shadow of the Collossus.'” It’s a video game, get it?

That’s it. Fine stoner entertainment, but not much more. Binge-watching will get you maybe through half an edible.

“I’m Dying Up Here” (Showtime, 2017)
My favorite hate-watch of 2017, a deeply flawed show packed with enough funny performances that I keep turning it on and suppressing my groans. Based loosely on what’s supposed to be a very good book about the alt-edy scene in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, the show’s set largely in the fictional Goldie’s, owned by — get this — a woman named Goldie, played by Melissa Leo with dramatic chops and a lot of corny dialogue. Goldie’s is basically The edy Store, which, fortunately for set designers, has not changed since the 1970s.

Goldie presides over a sophisticated edy slave trade, where ics work for no pay for the right to hone their acts and maybe catch the eyes of producers. The plotlines that don’t resolve around personal drama usually focus on the workability of this scheme, which, in the pilot episode, is plicated by a edian (Sebastian Stan) getting a big break on “The Tonight Show” and then killing himself, because there was nowhere to go but down.

God help me, I was pelled to keep watching, mostly because of the performances that anchor the b-plots. The a-plots are often excruciating, usually involving Bill (Andrew Santino), Nick (Jack Lacy), and Cassie (Ari Gaynor) battle their egos — and in Nick’s case, every drug available in 1975 Los Angeles — to Make It. But the b-team of actors are funny in a way that overes the occasional drab script — Clark Duke, Erik Griffin, Jon Daly, and Al Madrigal as a edian who is, correctly, mocked for making every single joke about Mexicans. There’s a throwaway scene in which Duke and Daly argue over whether the drowning death of Daly’s father makes any sense as an analogy that’s one of my favorite things all year. (Another favorite: A hanger-on edian played by Dom Irrera walking absent-mindedly into a fight, kicking a sleazy radio producer on the ground, and only then asking “hey, who we kickin’?”)

Also, to be fair, it’s damn hard to make fake “edy” work, as the people who suffered through “Studio 60” can attest. “30 Rock” usually got past this problem by making its show-within-a-show pletely surreal; “I’m Dying Up Here” does a good job manufacturing stand-up that sounds like it was delivered by people who haven’t quite made it.

I spent the last four years writing “The Show That Never Ends,” a history of/argument for progressive rock music, and it es out on June 13. You should buy it no matter where you live. But if you are lucky enough to live in one of several east coast/central time zone cities, you can buy it AND meet me AND hear me talk. What have you done to deserve this?

I was speeding; sure, I won’t deny that. It was 8:20 or so on Super Bowl Sunday, and I was returning my rental car at Detroit’s airport before jumping on a 10:00 flight to Minneapolis for a story. Detroit, like most big cities, has spawned an airport inside a morass of frontage roads — to return a rental, you follow the signs, turn to what seems like an abandoned stretch of lots, and you’re there.

So, I turned onto Lucas, passing by the Hertz drop-off, intending to get gas at the end of the street before circling back and dropping it off. I notice, surreally, a cop car blazing into my rear view mirror.

“Can you… actually get pulled over on the street where you’re dropping the car off?” I wonder.

Indeed, you can. A surly officer asks why I think I was pulled over.

“I was in a hurry, so maybe I missed a turn signal on the way in,” I speculate.

According to him, no: I did not give the right of way when turning onto the final frontage road. I cut someone off — him, I assume — and was going 41 in a 35 mph zone.

(Here I will pause for an instructional video on how uniquely strange it is to drive in Michigan.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2485Vi9eB4

“Do you have $100 in cash to post bond?” asks the cop.

My mind… I was going to say “races,” but it actually turns pretty slowly. “No,” I say, knowing I have around $85 in cash, “but I can pay a ticket.”

Friendly enough, right? Wrong. The cop returns to his car with my license, and with knowledge of my story — trying to return the car for my 10 a.m. flight so I can get to Minneapolis for work. In literally 90 minutes I will be out of his state, a problem for the motorists of the Twin Cities, not him.

He returns 10 minutes later, as I check my watch, and hands me a ticket — but no license.

“I’m holding onto your license as bond,” he says.

“Oh,” I say. “I didn’t realize that was what you meant by bond. Can I go to the ATM over there” — I point to the gas station, maybe 20 yards away — “and get the cash.”

The cop summons up that attitude that only an armed and un-criticizable agent of the state can summon. He already gave me a chance. He only charged me for speeding. I should cut my losses.

“But I can’t get on my plane without my license,” I say.

“You can use the ticket and say what happened,” he says.

This part of the story engenders less sympathy — suffice to say that instead of using the TSA pre-check status I pay for, I must show the ticket at a regular TSA line, empty my wallet to find that there’s no other card with my birth date, note the disbelief of the agent at the idea that the ticket would be enough ID, and get every single item patted down and searched before getting a chance to sprint to my plane. I make it by 5 minutes. Could be worse.

I can’t rent a car anymore, but I can borrow one from a friend. I can’t get back to the airport right before my flight on Monday — I will have to subject myself to another long pat-down. Okay. In future, I’ll travel with my passport.

But here is the long tail of the problem — getting?my license back means trusting the Wayne County traffic court to send it back. I’m not saying its employees are dishonest. On Monday, they seem perfectly polite, if confused. I’m saying an infamously cash-poor urban county is not exactly staffed up to process a ticket quickly or mail a license back. Also, I’ve moved since I got the license, and that’s the sort of thing you’d like to explain to a bureaucrat before they mail your ID to an address.

When I call, three times, I talk to three confused people who refer me to a website that doesn’t recognize my ticket number. My follow-up questions are directed the voicemail of “Maya,” or maybe “Maia,” with no indication of what she does.

Here is the larger context: I am shredded. I’ve worked every day of January and had half a day off in February. I’m lucky, insofar that once I’m not going through airports, I don’t need my ID to drive to work; I take public transportation. But I tend to pack my days with assignments, and now I’ve got to navigate around the motherfucking Wayne County traffic courts.

I guess I’m saying that I don’t understand the policy. You want to get dangerous drivers off the road? Okay. I am… probably more aware of the text messages being sent to me than I should while driving.

But Jesus Christ — why bludgeon someone who’s trying to drop off a rental car? Why, for speeding not on a road choked with motorists, but a road that exists so people can get out of your state and to a plane? Why throw someone into, as far as you know, days or weeks of difficulty that will impede his ability to get a job done?

From time to time, until November 8, people last year would ask me how much I was loving the political circus. “It must be the story of your career,” they’d say.

“Well, yes,” I would say. “Much like Joan Didion got the story of her career when her husband and daughter dead.”

Hyperbole — it’s our new lingua franca. I’d reported on politics for most of my life by the time the 2016 election began, and knew that elections typically devolved into gaffe-policing and guides to which ads were false. (Usually not most of them.) But 2016 was, as the documentarian Adam Curtis put it, a defeat for journalism, in which people like me were reminded how little people want to hear information that rumbles their worldview. My worst memory of the year is not anything from a rally; it is being part of the problem, and telling friends on election night that early returns suggested their favored candidate would win.

Lots of hairshirting already; I don’t need to add more. Once I got some distance from the election, I felt bursts of pleasure about what good had e out of the year.

Crank up the listicle-maker.

I wrote a book. After 12 years of daydreaming and 3 years of writing, I finished my history of progressive rock; it’s being edited now for a June 2017 release. The panic I have about articles (did I leave in any clunk? Will a grammar scold hunt me down?) is multiplied 1000fold but this is a lifetime goal that cost me a personal life and feels worth it.

I made new friends. This happens every fours, and while I’m not sure how much longer it can happen — do I want to be passing out on the Gillibrand campaign plane at age 39? — it’s always a joy. You develop a little patois on the campaign bus, and (assuming you’re not singularly annoying) you share it with people who are chasing the same deadlines as you. You trade transcripts; you let her have a question because he has a follow-up because you asked a question already.

I survived a car crash. Wasn’t planning on it, but a small nightmare finally came to me. I was making good time on the road from Madison to Green Bay (to De Pere, first), when a traffic stoppage came out of nowhere and I spun off, taking a car with me. The permanent damage has been a right thumb that no longer bends. And that is it. I could have died, I didn’t, and have never felt the same since.

I do a version of this every year. The campaign and my book deadline made this year’s explorations a little more limited — which is fine. I have maybe 10 more to see in order to not be befuddled by award season.

Moonlight

La-La-Land

Sing Street

Everybody Wants Some!!

Don’t Think Twice

Hell or High Water

Love & Friendship

Manchester by the Sea

The Witch

The Childhood of a Leader

Jackie

20th Century Women

Captain America: Civil War

Weiner

Doctor Strange

Arrival

Deadpool

Moana

Hidden Figures

10 Cloverfield Lane

Midnight Special

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

The Lobster

Hail, Caesar!

Finding Dory

Lion

Eye in the Sky

Zootopia

Sausage Party

All the Way

The Nice Guys

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Captain Fantastic

Genius

Don’t Breathe

Knight of Cups

Kubo and the Two Strings

The 13th

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising

How to Let Go of the World (and Love All the Things That Climate Can’t Change)

I’ve been traveling for work, so — maybe blessedly — I didn’t initially see this AP story by two reporters I like very much personally. It’s no patch on them when I say that “Wele to the Trump-Clinton conspiracy election” is a textbook-ready case of how the search for equivalence can wreck a piece of journalism.

The problems previewed by the headline?get worse in the nut graf.

Donald Trump and his surrogates hint at a mysterious “illness” afflicting rival Hillary Clinton. Pushing back, Clinton warns of murky ties between Trump and the Russian government, insinuating that her Republican opponent may be a puppet of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Two problems here. One: The ties between Trump and the Russians are by no means as “murky” as the conspiracy theory that Clinton’s doctors (and her campaign schedule) are covering up a devastating illness. Two: The Russia talk is not a pushback on the “Hillary’s health” stuff. It’s been happening independently; indeed, Clinton was been pushing it before Trump elevated the health rumors.

The second point is just obviously misleading, while the first requires the application of blinders that characters the worst both-sides journalism. Much of the story deals with the ways Trump has tried to exploit Internet theories about Clinton’s health, and how Clinton’s pivoted from that to an attack on Trump’s embrace of kookery more generally. The “but Russia!” equivalence platter is saved for the final two grafs.

In the aftermath of hacked Democratic emails, Trump encouraged hackers from Russia to find Clinton’s missing State Department emails, an apparent invitation for a foreign power to intervene in a U.S. election.

Clinton’s team frequently points to Trump’s ties to Russia. Her campaign has a page on its website devoted to a Q-and-A about Trump’s “bizarre relationship” with Russia, fueling an unproven theory that Trump is a shill for Putin.

So on the one hand, Trump is elevating theories that rely on rumors or forged medical records; on the other, Clinton’s accusation that Trump “is a shill for Putin” is “unproven.” But the first attack is baseless; the second is political rhetoric based on — wait for it — reporting from the AP.

I’m not fond of quickie campaign “fact sheets” like “5 questions every voter should ask about Donald Trump’s bizarre relationship with Russia.” Question 5 suggests that “Trump publicly encouraged further Russian espionage to help his campaign.” That’s true, though Trump later tried to pass it off as a joke. Question 4 is fishier, noting that “some suggest” that Trump’s as-yet hidden tax returns might reveal deals with Russian oligarchs. But the basis is a 2008 quote from Trump’s son Donald: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

Question 3 suggests that Trump would fulfill a Russian “wish list.” Again, there’s a basis: He has talked about lifting sanctions on Russia, and he rather uniquely among Republicans has said he wouldn’t contest the annexation of Crimea. Question 1 quotes a few instances of Trump praising Putin.

But Question 2 is the humdinger. Asking why Trump “surround[s] himself with advisers with links to the Kremlin,” the Clinton campaign… explains the links several Trump advisers have to Russia. The outdated page spends the most time on Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager until this month. The “kill shot” on Manafort is generally understood to be the AP’s August 17 story on his secret work for Ukraine’s pro-Russian faction.

Donald Trump’s campaign chairman helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party’s efforts to influence U.S. policy.

So, on the one hand, Trump’s campaign and surrogates are speculating wildly — and in some cases, citing bogus medical information — to question whether Hillary Clinton’s health has collapsed. On the other hand, Clinton’s campaign is citing Trump’s public statements, his family’s public statements, and the financial ties of campaign advisers to say that he’s shilling for Russia.

I am wracking my brains, and I can’t imagine how these two stories were conflated. In the quest to say that Both Sides Do It, the AP elevated Trump’s conspiracy-mongering about Clinton’s health to the level of his campaign’s well-reported Russia friendliness; it downgraded that friendliness to the level of a conspiracy.

Zootopia (Howard/Moore/Bush, 2016)
A terrifying and unrelenting vision of a world long after the apocalypse, where only mammals survived, and built their own civilization with all of the mistakes that zoomed humanity.

Nah, fuck it, this is a kid’s movie about a cute bunny (Ginnifer Goodwin) who fulfills her lifelong dream of being the first tiny mammal cop in a world of talking animals; previously, we see, only the largest animals had bee cops. (This seems entirely sensible, but a nice training sequence reveals how Judy Hopps learned to use her speed and high jump to pete with the more lumbering cops). Assigned to the garbage meter maid beat, she encounters a con artist fox (Jason Bateman), who is far more fortable with the limitations placed on him by speciesism. There is a mystery. Spoiler: They solve it.

The test of any kid’s cartoon is whether the target audience will find it cute and the parents who pay for it will find it witty. “Zootopia” succeeds, even if some of the jokes are right on the bunny nose. (A mob boss named Mr. Big — who is actually very tiny — and talks like Vito Corleone! Ah ha ha fuck you.) The characters are adorable, the world-building is gorgeous if theme park-esque, and there is a delightfully problematic through-line about whether we can ever escape our genetic inheritance. Put another way: This is a movie for children in which the hero explains that some animals may simply be “biologically” inclined to violence, and where the voice of Idris Elba, through a water buffalo, says that “this world was already broken.”

Kung Fu Panda 3 (Jennifer Yuh Nelson, 2016)
The delightful but derivative series continues (no one can say “concludes”) with a story about the titular panda, Po, (Jack Black) encountering an ancient, soul-sucking evil (J.K. Simmons) and overing him to bee a “master of qi.”

Look, if I was eight or nine years old, I fully believe that these would be my favorite movies — funny, furry characters getting into beautifully choreographed battles, all re-enactable in the backyard. As a man who was born around the same time as Michael Phelps but achieved much less, I still have a spot for these movies — in part because the voice casting rewards fans of “Mr. Show,” in part because I watch them when I am on planes and very tired.

Still, there’s a visible tug of war between the plot points that were designed by mittee and the dialogue punched up by funny people. I enjoyed the banter, especially a running gag about Kai’s frustration that no one remembers him 500 years after he was banished to the spirit realm. I sort of shrugged through the introduction of a Secret Panda Village where a civilization that abandoned Po (for reasons never explained) takes him in and acts all goofy. Evil is defeated by people Being Themselves and Working Together. Finally!

This is a model takedown, and a lot of fun even if you’re not so much a “Hamilton” hater so much as a person who can’t understand how your friends had the time and foresight to see this thing.

?

Caveat: The impossibility for anyone but your annoying Instagram friends to get a ticket is cited as evidence that few people have experienced the dang thing. “Hamilton is the ‘nationwide sensation’ that only .001% of the nation has even witnessed.”

?

True, not many people have gotten to see it in person. But the cast album went platinum, in an age when nobody buys albums anymore. Lines from the musical have infiltrated culture and reporting. Insofar as a piece of theater can bee widely known, this one is widely known. Just as people who have not seen “Star Wars” know “Luke, I Am Your Father,” I know “the room where it happens.”

?

That said, the people insisting that this is the greatest work of art of all time are silly. (That’s obviously Jethro Tull’s “Thick as a Brick.”) I guess the question is whether this musical is still cool when the inevitable “Rob Marshall’s ‘Hamilton'” film adaptation es out at the start of President Hillary Clinton’s second term.